Ministry of Finance has sold euro bonds worth one billion euros on foreign market

The Ministry of Finance (MFP) placed euro bonds worth EUR 1 billion on the foreign market by reopening the issue with the maturity of 10 years launched in April this year.

The issue has been placed with a 2.375% coupon at a yield of 2,114%, lower than the one of the initial issue in April (2.411%), following „the decrease of the related margin of Romania’s credit risk to the lowest level for such a maturity, namely 128 basis points over the mid-swap benchmark quotations, compared to 170 base points obtained in April,” mentioned MFP.

The issue has been thus oversubscribed by more than two times, and „the cumulative volume for this series reached EUR 2 billion, which led to an increased liquidity on the secondary market.”

„The demand has rapidly collected over EUR 2 billion in the first three and a half hours since launch and the total offer came from 140 investors from different regions. (…) The transaction’s investment base had a high geographical granularity and in terms of investor types,” says MFP.

The geographical distribution was as follows: Romania (18%), the UK (17%), Central and Eastern Europe (17%), Germany / Austria (14%), France / Benelux (10%), Italy (6%), Switzerland (5%), the US (4%), Scandinavia (3%) and other countries (6%).

By types of investors, fund managers were predominant (63%), followed by commercial banks and private banks (24%), pension funds and insurance companies (9%), and central banks and official institutions (4%).

This is Romania’s second launch in the international markets this year after the Ministry of Finance attracted EUR 1.75 billion in April by two separate issues, the one reopened today and another one with the maturity in 2035.

For the whole 2017, there are financings planned of EUR 3 billion by euro bonds, almost entirely covered by the issues launched so far.

„The transaction completed the external financing plan for 2017. The issue is in line with the objectives of the debt management strategy, by extending the average maturity of the government debt portfolio and strengthening the state’s reserve in foreign currency,” concludes the mentioned source.

The issue intermediaries were Barclays Bank PLC, Citigroup Global Markets Limited, Erste Group Bank AG, Societe Generale and ING Bank NV.